ABSTRACT
Who do you regard as your best friends? How important are your friends and other social connections for your well-being, trust and for enforcing norms? These are questions about social networks. In the past decades, sociology has witnessed a tremendous increase in research on social networks. To introduce you to this literature, I start with a puzzle that is known as the Friendship Paradox (7.1). I then describe key social network terminology, focusing on personal networks. We come across the distinction between strong and weak ties (7.2). Then I examine a property of personal networks, namely their size. How many friends do people have? How much variation is there between individuals in the size of their personal networks? (7.3). Subsequently, we will discover that personal networks tend to be highly clustered, i.e., that your connections also know each other (7.4). After that, we go beyond the discussion of personal networks. I introduce you to the “small-world phenomenon,” i.e., any two persons in contemporary large-scale societies are connected to each other via just a few intermediates. We will see that the combination of high clustering of personal networks and weak ties that provide shortcuts to other communities helps us to understand the small-world phenomenon (7.5). I then address societal changes in network structures. Do people have fewer friends nowadays? Are people visiting their neighbors less often? We will discuss the loss-of-community proposition (7.6). Then I will relate the insights from the literature on social networks to the concepts of “social cohesion” (7.7) and “social capital” (7.8).
